nerve the
exquisite quality of that which lay between them, and it thrilled her
through all her own perception of what she did, and all the applause at
how she did it. It was as if he, the priest, was borne out upon a deep
broad current that made toward solar spaces, toward infinite bounds, and
as if she, the actress, piloted him....

The Sphinx on the curtain--it had gone down in the old crooked
lines--again looked above and beyond them all. I have sometimes fancied
a trace of malignancy about her steady eyeballs, but perhaps that is
the accident or the design of the scene-painter; it does not show
in photographs. The audience was dispersing a trifle sedately;
the performance had been, as Mrs. Barberry told Mr. Justice Horne,
interesting but, depressing. "I hope," said Alicia to Stephen, fastening
the fluffy-white collar of the wrap he put round her, "that I needn't
be sorry I asked you to come. I don't quite know. But she did redeem it,
didn't she? That last scene--"

"Can you not be silent?" Arnold said, almost in a whisper; and her look
of astonishment showed her that there were tears in his eyes. He left
the theatre and walked light-headedly across Chowringhee and out into
the starlit empty darkness of the Maidan, where presently he stumbled
upon a wooden bench under a tree. There, after a little, sleep fell
upon his amazement, and he lay unconscious for an hour or two, while the
breeze stole across the grass from the river and the mast-head lights
watched beside the city. He woke chilled and normal, and when he reached
the Mission House in College Street his servant was surprised at the
unusual irritation of a necessary rebuke.

CHAPTER VI

While Alicia Livingstone fought with her imagination in accounting
for Lindsay's absence from the theatre on the first night of a notable
presentation by Miss Hilda Howe, he sat with his knees crossed on the
bench farthest back and the corner obscurest of the Salvation Army
Headquarters in Bentinck Street. It had become his accustomed place;
sitting there he had begun to feel like the adventurer under Niagara,
it was the only spot from which he could observe, try to understand and
cope with the torrential nature of his passion. Nearer to the fair charm
of his kneeling Laura, in the uncertain flare of the kerosene lamp and
the sound of the big drum, he grew blind, lost count, was carried away.
His persistent refusal of a better place also profited him in that it
brou